Intelligentsia Drives Rapid Ecommerce Growth Powered by an iPaaS ‘Hub’ Strategy

About

Intelligentsia Coffee is an American coffee roasting company and retailer based in the city of Chicago. Founded by Doug Zell and Emily Mange in 1995, the coffee company is an iconic fixture in the third wave coffee movement. Their Direct Trade coffee varieties are available through their website, and at over a dozen coffee bars in six cities across the States.

Background

A few years ago, Intelligentsia was using an outdated process to keep track of ECommerce sales orders that included the manual transfer of order batches from one application to another. On average, the coffee company was manually processing 200-400 daily transactions, but their eCommerce business was expanding rapidly. With the addition of Magento, and later, Amazon and Shopify, the business would soon require a more streamlined way to manage the boom in sales orders from all of their ECommerce platforms.

The challenge

Without automation, the order information would have to be downloaded, manually processed, and confirmed that everything was correct and before being uploaded to the accounting system.

Matt Riddle, director of IT & Systems Strategy, explained that they were easily looking at a few thousand orders across all their eCommerce platforms. “Overall, we were looking at thousands of transactions a day,” said Riddle. In addition, they also had retail transactions, plus other financial information such as employee files and payroll files.

As a result, extra overhead was needed to deal with any issues, errors or delays that came from the manual process, “For example, transaction rejections without errors, or if it does have an error and you don’t know what the error means, you can’t really fix it,” said Riddle. “And if somebody wanted to take a day off, that was always troubling because if the one person that really, intimately, knew that manual process was off, or say if they won the lottery the next day and didn’t come back, then we’re in trouble as a business. So, our desire to automate things was to protect the business and get rid of these manual processes that really prohibited us from growing.”

In 2018, the coffee company launched an internal project to connect their eCommerce platforms, retail transactions, and other accounting records to NetSuite.

In terms of ease of use and breadth of offerings, Riddle saw that Celigo was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of functionality. “In our business, we’re going more and more digital. Celigo has quite a marketplace of integration opportunities to move data from one system to another. They are my go-to partner for digital transformation,” he said.

The solution

To start off the migration project, Riddle used Celigo’s Magento 2 – NetSuite Integration App to integrate those two applications, and the results were instantaneous. The order-to-cash process was fully automated, now that the two applications had the ability to send and receive information from each other.

With the addition of Celigo’s Integration Apps for Amazon and Shopify, Riddle was able to simplify the business’ entire eCommerce order-to-cash process and keep his financial team to its current two-man operation. “We’ve made big gains in efficiencies and have significantly reduced the errors I spoke of in the early days. Deploying Celigo’s integrator.io has allowed us to maintain a very lean organization. It’s me and one other guy, and we support the entire business from an IT perspective. If we didn’t have Celigo, we wouldn’t be able to manage the eCommerce aspect of our business effectively with just two people.”

The coffee company’s retail operations have also benefited. Nightly closing processes that include reconciling cash night sheets, deposits, and credit card transactions can also be automated now. Instead of store staff spending time on cash closing processes, Riddle uses Celigo to automatically export the data from their point of sales system. “It’s turned a daily task into a weekly reconciliation task, so we’re saving on both sides of it.”

Bottom line

The impact of Celigo’s solutions for Intelligentsia extends well beyond merely streamlining manual tasks and saving time and labor. It has freed up time for Riddle significantly, allowing him to pursue new development or refinement of existing integrations. “Right now, we’re actually migrating away from the Magento platform to Shopify Plus. I am actively building out the integration for the new website, and with Celigo, it’s easy. All I needed was the most basic assistance, a couple of five-hour-long calls, and no project manager.”

In nearly every case, Riddle has found Celigo’s Integration Apps to be incredibly helpful in reining-in floating IT systems and “bringing them into the fold.” As a result, Riddle has been able to achieve one of his key objectives for one the world’s best-known independent coffee roasters, which is to ensure that the business is running on a system that allows them to sustain growth in sales on their eCommerce platforms, especially during challenging times.

“Celigo enables us to unify the business. We no longer have to manage data in multiple places and we can centrally manage things across all these different systems that we utilize. Our iPaaS deployment has allowed us to maintain a very lean organization. Celigo helps us run like a big company, but with a small company footprint. If I had to rely on our old processes now, I can’t imagine what that would be like!”